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Yahoo redesign aims to make site more inviting

Published on NewsOK
Modified: February 20, 2013 at 5:51 pm •
Published: February 20, 2013

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This image released by NBC shows Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer appearing on NBC News' "Today" show, Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2013 in New York to introduce the website's redesign. Yahoo is renovating the main entry into its website in an effort to get people to visit more frequently and linger for longer periods of time. The long-awaited makeover of Yahoo.com's home page is the most notable change to the website since the Internet company hired Marissa Mayer as its CEO seven months ago. The new look will start to gradually roll out in the U.S early Wednesday. (AP Photo/NBC Peter Kramer/NBC/NBC NewsWire)

The news feed also has been retooled so it is constantly refreshed with more material as a person scrolls down the page. (Yahoo gets its news content from many sources, including The Associated Press.) The ability to endlessly peruse stories is ideally suited for viewing on smartphones and tablet computers controlled by touch, although the feature also works on desktop machines operated with a mouse or keyboard.

Yahoo's new home page also shows snippets of text from each story, borrowing a page from the Google playbook that Mayer helped write. Those summaries may be especially handy on the smaller screens of mobile devices, a growing market that Mayer has said Yahoo must do a better job reaching if the company hopes to bounce back.

To minimize the chances that its story selections will irritate users, Yahoo is also adding controls that make it easy to inform the website about which topics aren't of interest.

The right side of the new home page will be devoted to a stack of capsules that Yahoo calls "utilities."

The capsules are devoted to weather, finance, sports, friends' birthdays, video clips and Yahoo's Flickr site for photos. Each one can be programmed to automatically show what a user wants to see, such as the weather in a specific city, information about a certain sports teams or the stocks in an individual's investment portfolio. Any of the utilities can be scrapped.

The left side of the page will list various Yahoo services, although slightly fewer than in the old setup.

Yahoo is planning to display just two ads on the home page. It's an implicit bet that the price that the company can charge for those slots will steadily rise if people become more immersed in the rest of the content on the page.

Investors have been betting Mayer will deliver the turnaround that eluded the three other full-time CEOs that preceded her in the past five years. Yahoo's stock fell 37 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $20.92 in Wednesday's trading. It has increased roughly 36 percent since Mayer's arrival.